The Insatiable (2006)
Picture: C+
Sound: C Extras: C- Film: C-
When I
first told some friends about reviewing the DVD of the new supernatural
thriller The Insatiable (2006), some
of them thought I was out of my mind and was covering the infamous XXX film
from the early 1980s. No! Instead, it is an amusingly failed attempt by
the Chuck Konzelman/Cary Solomon co-directing team to combine the vampire and
succubus legends (as if they were the same, though they are not) and make a
team of sorts out of Sean Patrick Flanery and Michael Biehn to be
somewhere between Kolchak: The Night
Stalker, its recent awful revival and The
X-Files. It never flies.
Flanery
is a salesman who witnesses a female vampire (Charlotte Ayanna) on the attack
and escapes, but no one believes his story until he starts doing research that
leads to someone who knows better (Biehn) and starts to fall for her more than
he’d like to. Will his selfishness
continue her killing spree?
Unfortunately,
the Cary Solomon/Chuck Konzelman/J.R. McGarrity script is derivative all the
way, however clever it may be to know the genre beyond most of the hacks making
formula garbage today. Unfortunately,
the directing of the actors is as flat as the tired look of all this and if
they could have stuck to one interesting monster instead of mixing everything
up, this could have been more than a processed cable-TV looking mess. The actors are wasted and so was 103 minutes
of my time. Don’t let this happen to
you.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is lame as shot by Director of
Photography Mike Washlesky, with awkward composition, no visual suspense to
match the lack there of in the script and the actors are not shot to best
advantage to boot for this genre or otherwise.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is surprisingly poor, reflects how limited the
audio was to begin with, while the music sounds like the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker theme with a
Middle Eastern twist, making no sense. Trying
to spread it out to all those speakers makes it very, very thin and weak. Trying to reconfigure it if you have that
sound option will not help.
Trailers for this and a few other similar THINKFilm
releases are the only extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
